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Spotify Introduces Apps to Point Listeners to Music

Charles Eshelman/Getty Images for SpotifyJann Wenner of Rolling Stone spoke Wednesday at a news conference announcing that the music-streaming service Spotify would be introducing apps.

3:02 p.m. | Updated
In the jargon of digital music, the streaming service Spotify offers a “lean-in” experience, meaning that a user needs to know what to look for and must type in the names of the desired songs or artists. By comparison, Pandora is more “lean back”: you just press play and let it go.

Now Spotify, which arrived from Europe in July and has been growing rapidly, is adding features to let users lean back a bit. At an elaborate news conference in Manhattan on Wednesday, the company announced that it had opened up its technology to let software developers and media companies build apps that would work within the Spotify system.

The apps announced on Wednesday included ones for publications like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and Billboard, as well as the concert-listings site Songkick and TuneWiki, a service that displays lyrics while a song plays.

The apps are free and can be selected through a tab on Spotify’s desktop program, much like Apple and Google’s app marketplaces. The apps will feed in content and have links to songs, helping users find music to listen to. In the example of Rolling Stone, the magazine’s app displays reviews and other features, with songs embedded.

“We think Spotify is the ultimate jukebox,”
Jann Wenner, the magazine’s founder and publisher, said at the event. “For music fans like myself, this is a dream come true.”

Developers will be able to create the apps through Spotify’s application programming interface, part of its programming code.

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, said this code would be open to all developers, but his company would approve the programs before putting them up.

Spotify, which was founded in Sweden in 2007 and is available in 10 countries, lets users listen to millions of songs and has a two-tiered business model: a free version that includes advertising and a paid service that eliminates ads and allows mobile access.

Spotify has 2.5 million paid users, Mr. Ek said, and 10 million active users, which usually means those who have logged in within 30 days. Since September, when Spotify was integrated more closely with Facebook, it has gained seven million users, 500,000 of them paying subscribers.